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Turbo Chef's New Residential Oven
TurboChef's new residential oven can cook a frozen pizza in 2 minutes and a rack of lamb in less than 5. Is it magic? No. But it's close.
|KITCHEN ACCOMPLISHED: The TurboChef double wall residential oven costs $7,900. Its controls were designed by the same people responsible for the iPod.
photography courtesy of TurboChef
In 1990, phil mckee took a business trip to japan that would eventually change how food is cooked in kitchens everywhere. At the time, he was 33 and had already started and sold one company. Now, with a background in math and an MBA from SMU, he was the president of a food ingredient company. It made an emulsifier that improved the taste and texture of microwaved bread.
Inspiration struck in Tokyo. McKee marveled at the variety of food items available in the city's prolific vending machines. Instead of the typical snack mix, their units stocked sandwiches, wraps, noodles, soup, egg rolls, and dispensed them in the same time it took to fill up a cup with soda. So when his client asked if he had any new ideas that he was working on, McKee found himself saying that he had a plan for a new kind of vending machine, one that could supply french fries, chicken nuggets, personal pizzas—food that was crispy and evenly cooked, not just nuked. And soon, what was once just a rough concept materialized into machine parts littering McKee's garage and kitchen. But McKee wasn't an engineer. "Pretty quickly I got in over my head," he says.
He knew the key to his vending machine would be its oven, which would need to cook the food more rapidly than any conventional oven could. For that, he enlisted Earl Winkelmann, an electrical engineer he had met through a business deal in the late '80s. Although McKee was living in Wichita, Kansas, at the time, a 1,200-square-foot northeast Dallas warehouse that Winkelmann had been using as an office became the young company's base of operations. Every week McKee would commute to Dallas in his '88 Oldsmobile—five hours each way—to work on the project. The time in the car, predating the omnipresence of cell phones and PDAs, was far from wasted. McKee dedicated those 10 hours a week to focused thought about the product and its technology. "It's not that we didn't make mistakes or do anything stupid, but we were very efficient," McKee says.
One year and $300,000 later, the two men had a quick-cooking oven—but that was it. No vending machine. What they invented (and patented) is known as airspeed technology. Basically, McKee and Winkelmann created a small blast furnace. Their oven cooked food by blowing hot air over and around it at more than 60 miles per hour. Microwaves were then introduced to accelerate the cooking even further. The catch was figuring out how to combine the two methods.
Pizza was the first item they test cooked in their contraption, and they went through thousands, usually 9-inch Tony's frozen pizzas from local Tom Thumb and Albertsons stores that McKee would bring back to the office. Eventually they were able to cook a frozen pizza in one minute flat. They also produced a low-tech video spotlighting the oven's features, which, along with the filed patents, generated interest from behemoths like Pizza Hut, Sam's Club, and Whitbread, a British food service company. In 1992, the then president of Pizza Hut visited the team's modest digs and was so taken with the oven's capabilities that he placed an order on the spot for 25 ovens at $10,000 each. (A change in leadership at Pizza Hut resulted in that order not being filled, but McKee and Winkelmann were allowed to keep much-needed cash from the $125,000 down payment.)
Soon after, a Sam's Club representative paid a visit. The chain was interested in using the oven in its cafes. McKee and Winkelmann prepared for days to get the cook settings right for the demo items, purchased, appropriately, from a Sam's Club frozen foods section. At this point, the oven was so large that they'd built a special wooden table to accommodate it. For the big visit, they covered it with an old tablecloth.
When the rep saw the oven demonstrated, he couldn't believe his eyes. The oven could not only cook a raw chicken breast in two minutes, but five of them, back to back, in about 10 minutes. The rep lifted the tablecloth to see if there was someone under the table, inserting pre-cooked food into the oven. "He didn't have a frame of reference with which to process or analyze what he was seeing," McKee says.
Orders started to stream in, and, by 1994, TurboChef, a name coined by McKee, was a publicly traded company with McKee as the CEO. Shortly after the IPO, with more than 250,000 miles logged on his car's odometer, he left Kansas and moved his family to Frisco. In 1998, McKee came to realize he was an entrepreneur more than a manager, and he bid farewell to TurboChef. Business was up and down after that, and in 2003 a group of investors bought the company. The following year, the windfall that McKee and Winkelmann had sought for so many years finally came. Subway restaurants ordered 20,000 ovens, ballooning the company's revenue from $3 million to $72 million. Although revenue declined in '05 and '06, analysts say TurboChef revenue in '07 should be more than $90 million.
Now, with a client list that includes Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, and 7-Eleven, and marketing materials that boast props from chefs Charlie Trotter (a company spokesman), Guenter Seeger, and Dean Fearing, the oven that began as pieces in McKee's Wichita kitchen is returning to where it started: the home.
The TurboChef global operations center occupies a sprawling red brick building in a nondescript Carrollton office park, just west of the Tollway. A sign bearing the company's sleek black-and-white logo is the only indication that anything remarkable might be going on inside. The development, testing, and fabrication of the ovens happen here, though the new residential models are currently produced by a Chicago outfit. More than 200 employees work inside the Carrollton outpost, which will soon include a retail showroom.
On this day in August, the sign-in log at the receptionist's desk contains six or seven entries of names with "Frog Design" listed next to them. Frog, a Palo Alto-based design firm responsible for the iPod's user-friendly features, helped develop the residential ovens' appearance and functionality. These models have a trademarked Cookwheel and Cook Navigator display that allow you to scroll through nearly 500 settings as easily as you would search for a favorite song.
The walls in the lobby area are covered with patents, and the receptionist volunteers that TurboChef owns 90 percent of the patents in the industry. Chef Alison Brushaber, vice president of culinary services and a former executive chef at Tony Roma's and Black-Eyed Pea, greets me wearing the sensible trappings of her position as the leader of an 18-member culinary team: a no-fuss blond bob and chef whites. She leads the way through a set of glass doors, beyond which lie brightly lit cubes interspersed with red-carpeted hallways.
We arrive at the TurboChef test kitchen, where the company's two residential model ovens—a double wall unit with both speedcook and convection ovens, retailing for $7,895, and a single wall unit featuring just the speedcook oven that sells for $5,995—sit in uninsulated, free-standing cabinets. The speedcook ovens gleam from their perches, one in Thermal Red and the other in Ivory, both with curved, stainless-steel handles tracing the upper edge of their arched, retro-modern facades. A traditional analog clock plays foil to the modern, iPod-like Cookwheel that has modes for air crisp, bake, broil, dehydrate, favorites, roast, and toast. Once a setting is selected, the Cook Navigator brings up a list of food selections with preset cook times that are typically 15 times shorter than those for conventional ovens. A cookbook, created by Brushaber and her team, comes with the oven, which has all the recipes pre-programmed.
Brushaber begins her oven demonstration without assistance from the cookbook. She takes a flatbread pizza out of the freezer, shows me that it is frozen solid, and then pops it into the preheated oven to bake. In the time it takes her to tell me how she came to work for the company—her restaurant consulting firm was acquired by a technology company that later merged with TurboChef—a gentle ding announces that the pizza has finished cooking. About two minutes. The pizza's surface is shiny and golden, with the cheese bubbling up near the crust's edge. Steve Beshara, the amiable chief branding officer of TurboChef whose build suggests frequent attendance at the company's cooking demos, is visiting from the Atlanta headquarters and has joined us in the kitchen. Between bites, he stresses the high-end nature of the ovens, likening their production to that of a Porsche—a handmade machine that transcends its function. As Brushaber rubs a generous portion of chateaubriand with olive oil, salt and pepper, and rosemary, Beshara goes on to explain that the oven's curved shape sprang from consumer research: people often used their hands to simulate arched contours when describing the kind of styling they wanted to see in an oven.
Once the meat has finished cooking, Brushaber rounds out the main course with roasted potatoes, incorporating the same seasonings that she used on the chateaubriand, and asparagus, wrapped loosely in a damp paper towel that helps produce perfect al dente results in just 45 seconds. She says the asparagus was one of the items that really impressed the editors of Gourmet magazine during one of TurboChef's many press demos. In an article about high-speed appliances from June of this year, the Wall Street Journal singled TurboChef out for a test run and praised the results of a rack of lamb cooked in five minutes.
The oven's brochure promises: "The time saved waiting on the oven is time gained with loved ones." Perhaps. But it's not difficult to come up with other time-saving inventions that have failed in that familial regard. The automobile, e-mail, and so on. For those without such reservations (and at least six grand to spend), Beshara promises: "It's one of those 'wow' things at dinner parties."
Mckee, a little grayer at the temples since his trip to Tokyo, is still working with Winkelmann, filing patents on new technologies. McKee is an avid cook, but he hasn't scored one of the new TurboChef residential ovens yet. He used to have some of the older commercial models at home. His latest project involves the back end of the cooking process: clean-up. He and Winkelmann are applying the technology of their oven to the dishwasher. Their latest patent was issued in March. Though he grants that speed dish-washing may not have the same appeal as speed cooking. "It's not as sexy as an oven," he says.
Write to [email protected].


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Louisiana DWF Enforcement Agents Receive DWI and Litter Enforcement Awards
OutdoorHub 04.05.12
Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) Enforcement Division agents received litter and driving or operating a boat while intoxicated (DWI) enforcement awards at the April 5 Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission meeting held in Baton Rouge.
Senior Agent Byron Cammack, 42, of Pineville, accepted the 7th annual KLB "Litter Enforcement Officer of the Year" award from KLB Executive Director Leigh Harris. Cammack also received the LDWF "Litter Enforcement Officer of the Year" award. Sgt. Toby Miller, 33, of Kentwood, took home the LDWF Enforcement Division "DWI Agent of the Year" award from LDWF Chief of Enforcement Col. Winton Vidrine for emphasizing DWI enforcement on the water and land.
"These awards confirm another job well done by our Enforcement Division and agents in helping to keep our woods and waterways clean and safe at the same time," said Col. Vidrine. "In addition to protecting the state's resources such as fish and game, our agents are well trained in DWI and litter detection and enforcement."
Miller is a 12 year veteran of the Enforcement Division who works out of the LDWF Region 7 Office in Baton Rouge and is assigned to patrol the St. Helena Parish area.
Cammack is a seven-year veteran of the Enforcement Division who works out of the LDWF Region 3 Office in Pineville and is assigned to patrol the Rapides Parish area. This is the third time he has won the KLB award for litter enforcement.
"This department is one of our best partners in litter prevention and enforcement," said Harris. "With law enforcement agencies like LDWF, people now believe they can get ticketed for littering. These littering tickets are a big reason in how we are going to change behaviors and attitudes towards littering in this state becoming unacceptable."
LDWF agents issued 186 DWI citations in 2011 statewide for those impaired operators of both vessels and vehicles. In Louisiana, a DWI can be issued to anyone operating a moving vessel or vehicle with a blood alcohol concentration of .08 or higher. First offense DWI on the water or on the road carries a $300 to $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail. Second offense DWI brings a $750 to $1,000 fine and between 30 days and six months in jail. Third offense DWI carries a $5,000 fine and between one and five years in jail.
LDWF agents issued 904 citations for simple, intentional and gross littering during 2011. The penalties for littering violations are fines between $75 and $1,000 and up to eight hours of community service in a litter abatement work program.

subset: commoncrawl


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A political scandal, a newspaper report claiming the family of China's premier had amassed billions of dollars, a slowing economy and a territorial dispute with a major trading partner — not the backdrop China's leadership would have hoped for heading into a significant once-in-a-decade political transition.
Yet, China's new generation of leaders will be defined not by the problems they inherit, but by whether they will have enough zeal to deliver reforms to keep Asia's largest economy on a sustainable growth path, China watchers say.
About 70 percent of China's top leadership positions are expected to change during the ruling Communist Party's Congress that starts on November 8, an event that has taken on huge importance.
It's not difficult to see why—China's economic transformation has astounded the world, with the country becoming the world's second biggest economy in 2010 from fifth place in 2002, and tipped to surpass the U.S. as the largest by 2020.
(Read More: China Cabinet Seeks Ambitious Economic Reform Agenda)
China's rise as an economic super power means what happens in domestic politics will be followed as closely abroad as it is at home.
"There is a lot of talk surrounding the new generation of leaders and the need to be bold with economic and political reform," said Patrick Chovanec, associate professor at Tsinghua University. "We have to see how that translates into reality."
A need to reform China's economy—poised to grow at its slowest annual pace in 13 years this year—by partly reducing a reliance on the export sector and increasing consumption at home is something the government has talked about before.
But analysts say significant reforms have been slow as the Chinese government has veered towards maintaining rapid economic growth to create enough jobs for the 1.3 billion population and keep unrest at bay.
The World Bank and Chinese government researchers warned earlier this year that China could face an economic crisis within 20 years if it did not overhaul its development model and implement changes such scaling back state-owned enterprises.
Yet, there are some signs that a push for reforms is growing.
In its strongest hint yet that it will move in the direction of reform, the Communist Party dropped a once standard reference to former leader Mao Zedong in statements ahead of the leadership change.
A recent report by Reuters said China's leaders have asked policy think tanks to produce ambitious economic reform plans that may cut the power of state-owned firms that enjoy huge privileges such as preferential access to bank loans and government contracts.
(Read More: China Power Brokers Make a Wish List of Leaders)
Another area of reform that might be on the agenda is the liberalization of capital markets, including boosting the use of the tightly-controlled yuan in global trade settlement.
"There appears to be lots of momentum for reforms of the financial sector, interest rate setting and lots of other reforms put forward by think tanks that involve reducing government involvement. That will continue, and that will be the medium-term picture," said Moody's Analytics economist Alistair Chan.
"Also, if you look at the reports, rumors about the upcoming leadership, it looks like we will get more reformists at the top," he said.
Vice President Xi Jinping is tipped to take over from President Hu Jintao in the handover of power, and Vice Premier Li Keqiang is expected to become China's next premier. The make-up of other key posts is unclear.
According to Chan, the removal of politician Bo Xilai from power may help spur reform.
Bo, one of China's most well-known politicians who fell from grace earlier this year after a close aide disclosed that Bo's wife had murdered a British businessman, was associated with increased state control.
"With the sacking of Bo, the reformists seem to have gained the upper hand. There is an opportunity here and I think they will use it," said Chan.
Reforms, but When?
Some analysts say the new leadership team could take a softly-softly approach to reforms, especially since it will have its hands full with a host of issues such as a territorial spat with Japan and pressure to deliver immediate monetary and fiscal stimulus to shore up the economy.
"In most leadership changes, the leaders have taken at least 2-3 years before they get enough control of the economy, over the people around them, the leadership team, to make a big difference," David Zweig, director of the center on China's transnational relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology told CNBC's 'Worldwide Exchange' last month.
Geoff Lewis, global market strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management agrees.
"It would be going against the grain of the current government if we suddenly see a strong aggressive move towards new reforms. The whole character of the Chinese administration under (Premier) Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao has been incremental and one foot on the brake with regards to opening up the economy," he told CNBC.
The problem, say analysts, is that China cannot afford to delay economic reforms given the pressures facing the economy.
(Read More: China Must Reform or Risk Crisis, Experts Warn )
"There is an established pattern that new standing committees coming in push through some early reforms; and that would be a good thing because China faces a complex number of challenges which need to be addressed with increasing urgency," Alistair Newton, senior political analyst at Nomura told CNBC. "So I hope we see some fairly quick reforms when the new leadership is in place."
The fear of social unrest could be another impetus for economic and political reforms, analysts said.
China does not need to look too far back into the past to be reminded of how economic discontent can bubble over into unrest at home – strikes have become increasingly frequent in recent years at private owned factories, with a strike in an industrial zone near Chengdu, in south-west China, grabbing the headlines in January. Plans to expand a petrochemical plan in eastern China meanwhile were shelved last month after days of protests.
In short, China's new generation of leaders may not have much time to act.
"China's economy has slowed faster than expected and this is leading to serious pressures on the financial sector," said Chovanec.
(Read More: China Making Slow, Steady Economic Recovery: Report)
"There are mounting pressures and they have some immediate issues they have to deal with and some tough choices to make from day one," he added.
- By CNBC's Dhara Ranasinghe


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NVHR Applauds Introduction of the Viral Hepatitis Testing Act of 2011
Groundbreaking Legislation Will Tackle the Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C Public Health Crisis with Increased Funding for Testing
Washington, DC — Reps. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Mike Honda (D-CA), joined by Reps. Charlie Dent (R-PA), Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Brian Bilbray (R-CA), today introduced the Viral Hepatitis Testing Act of 2011 in the House of Representatives, with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) introducing a parallel bill in the Senate. The Viral Hepatitis Testing Act of 2011 is a landmark bill aimed at preventing deaths from liver cancer through early detection of hepatitis B and C. The legislation calls for a national effort to expand hepatitis B and C education and testing programs, authorizing grants to health departments and community programs to increase access to testing and linkage to care.
"Viral hepatitis represents a looming crisis for our health care system," said Daniel Raymond, Chair of the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable (NVHR). "One in 50 Americans is chronically infected with hepatitis B or C, but the majority of cases have never been diagnosed. New and improved treatments mean that we finally have the tools to fight these viruses, and with rising rates of liver cancer and liver-related deaths from chronic viral hepatitis, the need for screening and early detection of hepatitis B and C is more urgent than ever."
The Viral Hepatitis Testing Act authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish grants to public health agencies and private non-profit groups for hepatitis B and C testing, accompanied by education and referral to medical care. The Act sets a target of ensuring that 75% of people with hepatitis B and C will be diagnosed by 2016, as a result of these testing programs.
"Viral hepatitis is a silent killer," said Senator Kerry. "Many people don't even know they have hepatitis B or C until it causes liver damage or even cancer years after the initial infection. Today as many as 5.3 million Americans are battling this disease, but we still don't have a national strategy to back them up in their fight. This bill will strengthen awareness, prevention, and treatment, hopefully stopping this silent disease from spreading further and claiming more lives."
The Viral Hepatitis Testing Act also calls for training of physicians and other health care providers to encourage hepatitis B and C testing in clinical settings. In addition, the bill encourages coordination of federal hepatitis B and C testing guidelines between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Differences between CDC and AHRQ testing guidelines have created confusion and inconsistencies, hindering the incorporation of hepatitis B and C testing in health care settings.
An estimated 5.3 million Americans are chronically infected with hepatitis B or hepatitis C. According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as 65% of people with hepatitis B and 75% of people with hepatitis C have never been diagnosed. If left undetected and untreated, chronic viral hepatitis can cause serious and potentially fatal liver disease. Moreover, chronic viral hepatitis poses a growing challenge to efforts to rein in health care expenditures. Current annual health care costs in the United States associated with hepatitis B amount to $2.5 billion. For hepatitis C, annual medical costs in 2009 were $30 billion. Gaps and failures in the national response to the hepatitis B and hepatitis C epidemics were highlighted in a landmark 2010 report from the Institutes of Medicine, and a subsequent Viral Hepatitis Action Plan released in May of this year by the Department of Health and Human Services emphasized the importance of dramatically scaling up testing efforts.
"NVHR welcomes the leadership of Representatives Cassidy and Honda," said Raymond. "The Viral Hepatitis Testing Act makes a critical, targeted investment in early diagnosis that will save both lives and money. We urge Congress to take swift action to pass this vital legislation. The millions of Americans with undiagnosed hepatitis B and hepatitis C cannot afford to wait."
NVHR is a coalition of more than 170 public, private and voluntary organizations dedicated to reducing the incidence of infection, morbidity and mortality from viral hepatitis in the United States. For more information, visit www.nvhr.org


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Alabama Police Work to End a Kidnapping Standoff
MIDLAND CITY, Ala. - As a police standoff with an Alabama man accused of holding a 5-year-old boy hostage in an underground bunker entered its fifth day on Saturday, authorities were saying little except that talks with the 65-year-old loner were continuing through a ventilation pipe.
Negotiators were working late Friday to persuade Jimmy Lee Dykes to surrender. Police have said they believe the Vietnam-era veteran fatally shot a school bus driver on Tuesday, and then abducted the boy from the bus.
Police have used a ventilation pipe to the bunker to talk to the man and deliver the boy medication for his emotional disorders, but they have not revealed how often they are in touch or what the conversations have been about.
Neighbors describe Dykes as a menacing figure who holds anti-government views.


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Posts Tagged 'Emmanuel Rengade'
World Cup 2014 in Brazil. The world watched. Even the planet's green beings watched. The green and art worlds had their own World Cup 2014 finalist in Brazil when Green Provocateur and team scored a goal as a Top 100 Finalist in the CODAAwards, an international competition for design projects that demonstrate the most successful […]
Filed under: BRAZIL, green | Leave a Comment
Tags: #artdesignbrazil, awards, Brazil, CODAworx, Emmanuel Rengade, Fazenda Catucaba, green, Jade Dressler, landscape art, Pasha Radetski, Portal do Sul, world cup 2014


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I have spoken to one professor so far about this, which of course was helpful, and so I am looking for additional opinions: To work with topological tools that were built via analysis, should I be a "master" at that analysis? By this I mean, for instance, to use Seiberg-Witten Theory and Floer Homologies.
As an "entering" graduate student I am "purely" a pure topologist, as in I have no real training in analysis but Algebraic Topology under my belt for $\approx 6$ years. Now learning Seiberg-Witten Floer Homology and other Floer homologies, I tend to put all/most of the analysis (ex: compactness of moduli spaces) in a black box, and then continue to "learn". As a result, I am unsure if I am kind of wasting my time, i.e. if I can still utilize the theories effectively (and of course, I would like to extend theories). Is there a "good" balance between 1) simply accepting the analysis and 2) being able to do the analysis with both hands tied behind your back (as Kronheimer-Mrowka seem to do in their Monopoles and 3-Manifolds book)?
I am unsure how to make this question less vague / more precise, but I feel that there is a good underlying question here that can have an informative response.


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Excellent views of Mars acquired by the VMC today at 07:00 CEST (05:00 UTC), and downloaded within hours, transmitted to ESOC in Darmstadt, processed by the Mars Express team and... here it is! Thanks to the MEX team and Simon Wood.
Hot on the heels of yesterday's images, here are today's set fresh off the spacecraft; again we see possible clouds/dust round the poles.
These images were taken at an altitude of 9900 km above the surface at 07:00 CEST (5:00 UTC) this morning and transmitted back to Earth at 13:15 CEST (11:15 UTC).
This rapid turn around is in part due to the current Earth - Mars distance being 'only' 123 336 112 km. At this distance it only takes 6 mins 51 seconds for signals travel from the spacecraft to Earth. (As we get further away this can increase to up to 25 minutes.)
Propagation delay display on the Mars Express Mission Control System
This proximity gives us higher data transmission rates, which mean we can transmit more of the stored data from the science instruments – and thus occasionally leaves us with spare data downlink capacity in some of our ground station passes. This spare capacity enables us to schedule the VMC data dumps much closer to the VMC observations.
Continuing from yesterday's highlighting of the Phoenix lander, here we have marked the landing site of the NASA Mars Exploration Rover B - Opportunity.
Opportunity is a fellow seasoned Martian explorer; it was launched only 5 days after Mars Express on 7 June 2003, landing on 25 January 2004 – one month after we entered Martian orbit.
Its landing site is located in the Meridiani Planum, an area of interest due to concentrations of the mineral Hematite, which on Earth is often formed in the presence of water.
With the possibility of water-formed minerals located here, it is not surprising that this is an area also investigated by our mineralogical Spectrometer OMEGA and our high resolution camera HRSC.
As with Phoenix, its sister rover Spirit and, currently, Curiosity, Mars Express has performed communication activities with Opportunity over the years, including the relay of the image above from the surface back to Earth.
As usual, the full set of this morning's images is available in Flickr.


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I've been reading and reviewing digital security books seriously since 2000. This is the 6th time I've formally announced a winner; see my bestbook label for previous winners.
Compared to 2010 (31 books), 2011 saw a decrease to 22 books. Remember all reading is neither equal nor fast. When I review a book, I am sure to read it and not just skim it. For 10 books last year, I chose not to read them but to instead post impressions. Posts called "impressions" provide my sense of the book but I do not publish them in my Amazon.com reviews.
My ratings for 2011 can be summarized as follows:
- 5 stars: 10 books
- 4 stars: 7 books
- 3 stars: 4 books
- 2 stars: 1 book
- 1 stars: 0 books
Here's my overall ranking of the five star reviews; this means all of the following are excellent books. The links point to my reviews.
- 10. pfSense by Jim Pingle; Reed Media Services.
- 9. Beginning Visual C++ 2010 by Ivor Horton; Wrox
- 8. Windows System Programming, 4th Ed by Johnson M. Hart; Addison-Wesley.
- 7. Beginning C, 4th Ed by Ivor Horton; Apress
- 6. Robust Control System Networks by Ralph Langner; Momentum Press.
- 5. Managed Code Rootkits by Erez Metula; Syngress.
- 4. Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick and William L. Simon; Little, Brown and Company.
- 3. America the Vulnerable by Joel Brenner; Penguin Press HC.
- 2. Windows Internals, 5th Ed by Mark Russinovich, David A. Solomon, and Alex Ionescu; Microsoft Press.
- Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Ed by Jon Erickson; No Starch. My review said in part:
Jon Erickson's Hacking, 2nd Ed (H2E) is one of the most remarkable books in the group I just read. H2E is in some senses amazing because the author takes the reader on a journey through programming, exploitation, shellcode, and so forth, yet helps the reader climb each mountain. While the material is sufficiently technical to scare some readers away, those that remain will definitely learn more about the craft.
Thank you to all publishers who sent me books in 2011. I have plenty more to read in 2012.
Congratulations to all the authors who wrote great books in 2011, and who are publishing titles in 2012!


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Black Uni 2020 Volkswagen Jetta 1.4T S FWD 8-Speed Automatic with Tiptronic 1.4L TSI Storm Gray Cloth.
Schumacher discount Price includes all incentives, excludes government fees, taxes, finance charges, dealer fees, and electronic filing charge. Offer cannot be combined any APR specials, Must finance through Volkswagen Financial Services. Not everyone will qualify, Please see Schumacher Volkswagen for complete details.
WE DELIVER TO YOUR HOME OR OFFICE !!!....Back up Camera, Bluetooth, Storm Gray Cloth, 4 Speakers, 4-Wheel Disc Brakes, ABS brakes, Air Conditioning, Alloy wheels, AM/FM radio, Brake assist, Bumpers: body-color, Cloth Seat Trim, Delay-off headlights, Driver door bin, Driver vanity mirror, Dual front impact airbags, Dual front side impact airbags, Electronic Stability Control, Emergency communication system: VW Car-Net services (capabilities require enrollment or subscription), Exterior Parking Camera Rear, First Aid Kit, Front anti-roll bar, Front Bucket Seats, Front Center Armrest, Front Comfort Seats, Front wheel independent suspension, Fully automatic headlights, Heavy Duty Trunk Liner w/VW CarGo Blocks, Illuminated entry, Low tire pressure warning, Monster Mats w/Logo Rubber Mats Kit (Set of 4), Occupant sensing airbag, Outside temperature display, Overhead airbag, Panic alarm, Passenger door bin, Passenger vanity mirror, Power door mirrors, Power steering, Power windows, Radio data system, Radio: Composition Color w/6.5" Touchscreen, Rear anti-roll bar, Rear reading lights, Rear window defroster, Remote keyless entry, Roadside Assistance Kit, Speed control, Speed-sensing steering, Split folding rear seat, Steering wheel mounted audio controls, Tachometer, Telescoping steering wheel, Tilt steering wheel, Traction control, Trip computer, Variably intermittent wipers, VW App-Connect (w/Apple CarPlay, Android Auto & MirrorLink), and VW Care. 30/40 City/Highway MPG
* 2020 KBB.com 10 Coolest New Cars Under $20,000
Schumacher VW of West Palm Beach strives through the hard work and sincere commitment of their team of over 800 employees to provide the best automotive shopping experience available. Our mission is to "Serve Customers for Life". Commitment to our customers and providing quality service is evident in our world class state of the art facilities, great selection of products, and the finest employees in the industry.
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A $10 Donation places a Rose and Flower Tribute at 12 Fort Jackson National Cemetery Grave Sites. $100 Sponsorship completes a bucket of 125 roses.
$55 raised
$7,000 goal
The Memorial Day Flowers Foundation organizes the donation, hand out, and placement of roses and other flowers at cemeteries across the country. It is an opportunity for you to show family members that the sacrifices made by their interred loved ones are remembered. We encourage you and your family participate in the laying of roses at Fort Jackson National Cemetery on May 28th, the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend. Each volunteer pair will receive a bucket of 125 roses to place at 125 headstones; respectfully reading the headstone inscription and thanking them for their service. This activity takes approximately two hours.


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Old Settlers' Day traces its history to 1881
Old Settlers' Day is as rich in tradition and as filled with constant change and progress as the years past which it honors. Indeed, it is the careful blending of tradition with innovation that makes Old Settlers' Day one of the best annual celebrations in Central Kansas.
Always county-oriented, Old Settlers' Day began Jan. 7, 1881, with a reunion for all people who settled in Marion County in the 1860s. The old settlers gathered for a basket dinner and reminiscing in Marion.
Other "pioneer picnics" and old-fashioned Independence Day celebrations were conducted both before and after this affair, but Jan. 7, 1881, is generally cited as the birthday of Old Settlers' Day.
In 1912, at the suggestion of the Marion Record, Old Settlers' Day was revived and made an annual affair. The Marion County Old Settlers' Association was formed to supervise the event. Thomas Potter of Peabody was the association's first president, and Alex Case of Marion was its original secretary.
Prominent speakers from among early settlers of Marion County gathered Oct. 16, 1912, in Marion's Central Park and delivered speeches. Incidents and reminiscences of early days were told. Old settlers from all parts of the county, state and nation swarmed to Marion for the gala.
Similar celebrations followed in 1913 and 1914. In 1915, the affair's date was changed to late September, and several new additions were added. Band concerts, parades, and free sporting events all were included for the first time.
The annual festival continued thereafter, sometimes in early summer and occasionally in late autumn. Late September seemed to be the most desirable time of the year.
For many years, Old Settlers' Day was on a Thursday or a Friday. In 1965, the celebration's date was finalized. Because most people could attend Saturday celebrations and weather conditions in late-September were most favorable, Old Settlers' Day was scheduled for the last Saturday in September each year.
Around that time, the tradition of honoring original settlers, who by then would have been more than 100 years old, was altered, and the event was made to coincide with high school class reunions, which previously had been scheduled at various other times throughout the year.
Last modified Sept. 27, 2018


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The system on my workstation was installed in 2008, December. Actually, I installed Debian AMD64 version over an i386 version on the same box, which was installed around 2003.
Debian ships tools that makes it easy to keep a clean system. For instance, debfoster allows to easily get rid of all no-longer necessary libraries and al: you just have to select the important pieces and it will remove any software that is not required by one of these. And apt-get, nowadays, just like deborphan used to, even warns you when some software is no longer required and provides you with the autoremove command line argument that do the job automatically.
(debfoster is, supposedly, deprecated, like apt-get is in favor of aptitude. Well, I like debfoster)
That being said, if I run
dpkg --list | grep ^r | nl | tail -n 1 on this box, after only one year, I get 617 lines about removed software I do not care about. Mostly, they were kept in the dpkg database because I (or me using the system) modified their conffiles. The following will clean this:
for package in `dpkg --list | grep ^r | cut -f 3 -d " "`; do dpkg --purge $package; done && debfoster


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Two treatments of the Democratic-liberal future divert our attention this morning. Tom Edsall's column in the Times raises lots of interesting, important, long-term questions for liberalism that I'll try to explore by turn in the coming weeks. A Politico piece by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman puts the matter, as Politico is want to do, in more immediate and hyped-up terms.
Edsall is working off a recent piece by Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest claiming that "the blue model" of government and society is fast running out of answers for the coming fiscal crises, that the entitlement state can't be sustained, etc. The Politico piece insists that in the coming weeks and years, on a raft of fiscal and economic issues, the Democrats are going to have to "decide whether they want to be principally known as the party of Rahm Emanuel or the party of Elizabeth Warren."
It's easy to predict that this article is going to come in for a massive round of abuse on the liberal blogs today, because when outlets like Politico run articles like this, they tend to channel what the liberal blogs call the Very Serious People, and the unwritten assumption is of course that the party is on the verge of going the Warren route, which is understood to be the hippie route, and it's going to be a giant train wreck, and everyone will get to write #demsindisarray stories forever!
The Politico piece is actually more nuanced than these pieces usually are, if you read all four pages, and it gives a pretty fair shake to the Warren point of view. What I dispute is the premise.
It is true--and Edsall makes this point as well--that the Democratic coaltion of upscale whites and working-class people of color contains some contradictions. An economy that works well for the former--the people with the money, let's face it--doesn't necessarily work well for the latter and indeed might punish the latter in some respects. There are some tough and divisive decisions coming, and there will be internal dissension, especially on Social Security and Medicare, and especially especially vis a vis the working poor.
But on the other hand, there are a lot of things both of these groups basically agree on. They agree on higher taxes for the wealthy. They agree on a vigorous state. They agree, in fact, on just about everything except entitlements. And trade, although the trade gap was much wider in the Clinton era, and the Warren wing (Warren wing? She's been in office two weeks!) has come around to a gruding acceptance of free trade, meliorated in certain ways.
In other words there are a lot of economic decisions and policies on which Warren and Emanuel would agree. That "middle-out" economic view is taking shape now. The differences are important, but Democrats tend to let themselves get too drawn in to these media narratives about how this or that is a battle for "the soul of the party." The Democratic Party is hetergeneous; schisms are inevitable. But the big differences of opinion are few.
Meanwhile, it's worth remembering that while the Democrats are apparently deciding between Warren and Emanuel, the Republicans are the party of Crazy Eddie. I'd say they're in just a slightly bigger pickle than the Democrats. The GOP is a complete joke, relevant only because they've been able to exploit the economic crisis that they created (!) and because they've figured out how to gum up the works in Washington, preventing any progress while representing really only about one-third of America. Whether the Republican Party is even going to exist in 20 years is a fair question. We'll get to that, too.


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A C-clamp.
Need to know how to check brake calipers. Lost a rotor last night to a new set of semi metalic pads. Pads were installed on Sunday and the rotor and the exterior pad on the left side of the car are destroyed with less than 2 hours of driving. My thoughts are caliper piston could be sticking or that the caliper is not sliding on the pins. How do you check both of these for proper operation?
A C-clamp.
'01 540it, 6/01
'03 325i 5 speed, 9/02
'10 535ix. 9/09
'10 mini 6 speed
'15 mini countryman 6 speed
I think I may have found my problem. I normally hi-temp grease the caliper pins but looking on this forum I have discovered they should be installed dry, or at least using a specialized coating. I bet the grease has caused the pads to bind up. I will pull the brakes tonight and do a through cleaning. New rotors and pads with a clean caliper should do the trick. I will look into the pin lube though
Will give it a go. Parts are suppose to be in this afternoon
even though you're supposed to put them in dry and clean a number of people here have greased them in the past without the problem that you had
Even with a sticking caliper i haven't seen one kill the pad in only a couple of hours, it usually takes weeks and is pretty obvious by the pull on the steering wheel
Back looking at this stuff for todays issues. Amazing info.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy
we had some cases especially on E32 750 with the H31 brake unit in our warehouse which were long time parked, that the brake calipers were stuck. The problem is the brake master cylinder, inside there are some seals and a bakelite ring, this bakelite ring 'swells' by age and then the master is stuck at some point. I know of some people which has disassembled the brake master and 'polished' a bit off the diameter of the bakelite ring.
Here a pic how it looks inside a H31 brake master cylinder, probably the others look same / similar
Last edited by genphreak; 10-16-2019 at 06:44 PM.
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kibokojoe, re the binding caliper, I doubt the grease is the culprit*, IMHO it isn't used because the grease only attracts dirt which will cause abrasion, even allow larger things to stick potentially (?)
* unless you hit some sand/fine debris which somehow got lodged in a piston caliper and caused it to bind. Never seen this happen.
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Ancient Coins, Auction Services, World Paper Money and Collector Services in Starke, Boynton Beach, Miramar, Sarasota, Lake Mary, Nichols, Pensacola, Panama City and Saint Petersburg
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Welcome to MA-Shops, the world's most trusted online coin and paper money marketplace. MA-Shops offers collectors and enthusiasts access to nearly 1 million rare and important ancient and modern coins, medals, banknotes, militaria and collectibles.
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MAC Coin Trading
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Winning the Mandate Debate
March 25 issue editorial on Health and Human Services issue.
The fight for religious freedom has faced new and unpredictable hurdles in the two months since Kathleen Sebelius approved a rule that requires Catholic institutions to provide services that violate their religious teachings.
Since the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services unveiled the final version of the contraception mandate, advocates for co-pay-free sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs have launched a campaign of misinformation, characterizing Church leaders' defense of the "first freedom" as a "war against women."
There's good news, however. A CBS/New York Times poll released March 13 confirmed that a slight majority of Americans share the bishops' opposition to the mandate, and the numbers suggest that the administration's campaign to win support for the federal rule may have backfired.
Conducted March 7-11, the survey of 1,000 Americans yielded some surprising results that suggest the bishops' consistent opposition to the mandate is having an impact.
Among a range of questions on election-year issues, the poll asked: "Do you think health-insurance plans for all employers should have to cover the full cost of birth control for their female employees, or should employers be allowed to opt out of covering that based on religious or moral objections?"
A majority of respondents said that employers should have the right to opt out. More significantly, 57% of respondents (including 48% of women) agreed that "religiously affiliated employers" should be able to opt out.
The question did not mention that abortion-inducing drugs were included in mandated services.
Opinion polls, pro or con, are not the whole story, of course. Prayer, catechesis, outreach to all Americans of good will, and reasoned debate on op-ed pages and in church halls will all play an essential role. The unity of purpose is reflected in our story on Catholics and Evangelicals Together on page one in this issue.
But the polls provide evidence that the bishops' message is getting through, and we have the leaders at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to thank.
It's also time to get out fresh information about the administration's "fine on faith" — paid by employers who resist the government's demand that they violate their objections to contraception services on moral or religious grounds. This "fine," say opponents of the mandate, means "religious freedom is no longer free."
A recent report issued by the Congressional Research Service states, "A group health plan that fails to comply with the pertinent requirements in the IRC [Internal Revenue Code] may be subject to a tax of $100 for each day in the noncompliance period with respect to each individual to whom such failure relates."
Church-affiliated organizations, hospitals or universities that refuse to comply with the mandate could face annual fines of $2,000 per employee. Institutions with thousands of employees could be fined millions of dollars annually.
Yet faithful, informed Catholics understand that a strong and courageous defense of the freedom of conscience exercised by church-affiliated institutions yields benefits for all Americans. Shoring up the religious identity and mission of Catholic universities, hospitals and social agencies also bolsters every civil institution that plays an essential role of mediator between the individual and the state. When the state overreaches, the impact is rarely limited to a single element of society. Everyone suffers. Americans are just beginning to wake up to the fact that health of the "first freedom" serves as a bellwether for the health of our democracy.


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Pageants 1
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The Pageant of Ayrshire: The Story of Scotland's Struggle for Independence
From the outset of planning for this event in 1932, there was no shortage of ambition to make the pageant of Ayrshire a success. Despite the unpromising venue selected, the uncertainty of the weath...


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I would like to learn Italian
Worldwide delivery available - full shipping service in operation
Linguaphone All Talk Italian is an audio-only course that has been devised to help you understand and speak Italian without having to consult written material, apart from a short introduction and vocabulary and verb guides.
During the entertaining story of Georges visit to Rome you will hear native speakers from Italy conversing at normal speed, and with practice you will quickly understand and speak Italian as it is spoken. Because you will "hear" the language - rather than "see" a written version of it – your accent will be an authentic copy of the native speaker accent.
The storyline
Linguaphone All Talk is different to other language courses. The course evolves around a series of story dialogues. The story develops around George's visit to Rome and all the problems he encounters. It's an enjoyable and entertaining storyline and sees George learning about Italy, Italian culture and most importantly, learning the Italian language.
Learn by Listening
It is sometimes difficult to gain an authentic accent when you can see the words in your own alphabet. Working from sounds alone rapidly gives you confidence in what you hear. It also removes the desire to 'see' the language before daring to use or respond to it.
You're in control
Linguaphone all Talk utilises the highly-successful tried and tested Linguaphone method of 'listen, understand and speak'. One of the great advantages of this audio-only course is that you are in control, and the pace of your learning is entirely up to you.
Included with all the vocabulary and grammar, there are dialogues, comprehension tests and other learning activities. You will also hear a number of what we've called 'verb boxes' – brief sections in which you can listen to some of the different forms of useful Italian verbs. Overall it's a highly enjoyable language course and designed to get you speaking Italian in no time.
Millions of people across the world have successfully learned a new language using the Linguaphone method. Now you can learn Italian online with our new Italian e-learning language course.
Our proven method - Listen, Understand, Speak - has helped over 7 million people learn a new language in a natural and effective way. From basic phrases through to fluent conversation, you'll be surprised at how quickly a second language becomes second nature.
Listening to native Itallian speakers is the most relaxing and involved way to learn, helping you associate the sounds you hear with the words and sentences you read.
By listening and reading the Italian language, you begin to discover what each word means. Everyday objects have exciting new names. Gradually words, then phrases, become clear and your reading, writing and speaking of the language will improve.
Many people find that speaking their new language is the hardest part. But whether you want to learn French online for business or for holidays, Linguaphone's method makes sure that you start speaking from the very first lesson with the correct pronunciation.


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CALGARY, AB. – The Western Hockey League announced today that Prince Albert Raiders forward Mark McNeill is the Denny's WHL Player of the Week.
McNeill collected seven points, scoring two goals and five assists to go with a +3 rating, in three games over the past week helping the Raiders to a 2-1-0-0 road record.
On Wednesday, November 7, the Raiders played host to East Division rivals the Swift Current Broncos at the Art Hauser Centre in Prince Albert. McNeill tallied one goal, three assists and was named the game's 1st Star as the Raiders edged the Broncos 6-5. On Friday, November 9, the Seattle Thunderbirds were in Prince Albert to face the Raiders. McNeill collected one goal, one assist and was named the game's 2nd Star as the Raiders blanked the Tbirds 3-0. On Saturday, November 10, McNeill picked up one assist in the Raiders 4-1 road loss to the Swift Current Broncos.
McNeill currently leads the Raiders in scoring and sits 23rd among all WHL players with 24 points (8 goals, 16 assists) in 21 games played. The Raiders currently hold top spot in the WHL East Division and 2nd in the Eastern Conference with a 13-6-0-2 record for 28 points.
A 19-year-old from Edmonton, AB, McNeill is playing his fourth straight year with the Prince Albert Raiders. A 5th overall selection by the Raiders in the 2008 WHL Draft, McNeill was selected 18th overall by the Chicago Blackhawks in the 2011 NHL Draft. McNeill is slated to complete with Team WHL against the Russian National Junior Team this Wednesday in Vancouver in game five of the 2012 Subway Super Series. For more information visit www.subwaysuperseries.ca.
The WHL has also nominated Mac Carruth of the Portland Winterhawks for the CHL Goaltender of the Week Award. Carruth posted a 4-0-0-0 record this past week, stopping 89 of 92 shots faced for a 0.967 save-percentage and 0.92 goals-against average. Carruth, a 20-year-old from Shorewood, MN, currently leads all WHL goaltenders with a sizzling 0.963 save percentage and 0.97 goals-against average.
Denny's WHL Player of the Week
Nov. 5 – Nov. 11: Mark McNeill, Prince Albert Raiders
Oct. 29 – Nov. 4: Justin Feser, Tri-City Americans
Oct. 22 – Oct. 28: Curtis Valk, Medicine Hat Tigers
Oct. 15 – Oct. 21: Colin Smith, Kamloops Blazers
Oct. 8 – Oct. 14: JC Lipon, Kamloops Blazers
Oct. 1 – Oct. 7: JC Lipon, Kamloops Blazers
Sept. 24 – Sept. 30: Hunter Shinkaruk, Medicine Hat Tigers
Sept. 20 – Sept. 23: Nicolas Petan, Portland Winterhawks


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Who deserves greatness, deserves your hate… Better it is die, better to starve, than crave the hire, which first we do deserve… How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world… Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. That it should come to this!
William Shakespeare, quotes from Coriolanus and Hamlet
The hardest tasks within our rough lives are often the simplest ideas to write on paper. The reasons for this absurdity relate to the human condition under civilization.
We put the mind to the grind work, and then life's complications immediately spring up. Mind habits and inherited customs seem to crowd out the divine practice.
Maybe we should just put away our cravings and desires in 'becoming better, more accomplished' humans. Have we not already accessed the apex of our powers? We could simply acknowledge our own humanity, while embracing the wisdom that already resides inside of us.
Many astute writers of wisdom have also noticed this sick political-economic system, which vomits continually into the cesspool of human civilization. Yet so many humans would rather drown into their own mind bile – falling into rancid deaths. Some essayists have asked: how can we fight such monstrosities, and tear down the rotting walls of the system?
We are all doomed towards coming old age, terminal illness and final expiration. Since we will all die and exist no more, then we should not use violence against this unjust and violent system. Being inside the human condition, we suffer, and we are all guilty of unkind actions. Violence is only feasible as an act of self-defense, when confronting a brutal physical attack.
Humanity survives within a turbulence that condemns most of us to rot, beg and wander. This Monster convicts the weaker parts of humanity to die off sooner. Global Monopoly Capitalism and the State have united together in denying us the noble life.
Forsaking compassion, this horrid complex of institutional violence gifts its free crap to the cowardly, dishonest, and cruel. The Asylum-Hell grows stronger. It breathes bloody bile. We are living in it. Openings for vitality and freedom run desolate.
Only Anarchy can save us. Anarchy gives the designs for tearing down this rotten system. There are three steps to the Anarchy process.
The first step is a complete and total rejection of this actual world.
The second course of action ignores the elites' loaded games, traps and snares, which have already ambushed most humans.
The third stage forces us to act, cultivate our own minds and bodies, while leaving expanses for our own liberation.
How does such a humanistic practice and method function? First, we read, and talk with good friends and family. If we are tired of the lies, living the life of torture, and the potential for legal murder, then we must make the First Decision. We categorically and completely refuse the operation of the Machine. This first action is the hardest part of the process.
So many us, including many Anarchists, still possess that glimmer of hope – maybe the rotten operation will reform itself, change to a better position – allow the formerly hated prophets to reign? Nothing of the sort will ever happen.
Once an organization degenerates into legal crime and violence, it is not salvageable. But with all of the eternal violence and lies of the State, emerges the resistance – Anarchy.
Instead, we resign ourselves to the actuality of the moment. We let go of our own doubts and slothful fantasy nonsense.
While the Mainstream Media, paid hacks and corporate advertising madmen scream about Changes, Election-Selections, Order, State of the World, etc., we just ignore them. We let their rants enter the universal space filled with mostly garbage culture, and then we go on our ways. We refuse to pay any attention to their prattle.
We never attend their events, gatherings, polls, rituals, interviews, elections, comments, discussions, programs, etc. Again, just letting go is sufficient. This is easier written than done, yet we never asked to live inside such a corrupt and vile social structure – so we opt out. Actions speak greater volumes on the nature of resistance and power.
Next, we create works of art that expose and denounce the legal criminality. Each one of us has artistic abilities where we can expose such disreputable organizations: continual state violence, political-economic elite 'high culture,' the scams of global monopoly capitalism, or FIRE sectors: finance-bank swindles, insurance frauds and real estate property pimping.
For us historians, we write – and write some more, all in opposition to the lies and deceit. There exist carpenters, sculptors, architects and builders who create living structures in tune with the land and in opposition to real estate dealer gangs. We have cooks that can prepare delicious meals from scratch outside of the restaurant shell game, or even fabricate their own sweet wine.
Real doctors run open practices where they are both healers and educators on the human body. How many other painters, mechanics, website developers, athletes, electricians, poets and scientists could contribute to a community's imaginative artistry and growing liberty.
It is through the act, the process, and the practice where the liberation births. The Matrix of Hate and Money, disguised through crap advertising and base publicity, keeps pushing the lies that we all must advance, force ourselves to swallow, imprison ourselves within goals, embrace outcomes through obsessive note taking. They tell us: we must reach the distant apex and far off objectives. Self-help websites and spirituality videos continue such flimflam operations.
We return to the process. We reject their garbage of mental derangement, while we ignore their traps to spend money, all so they can abuse our good intentions. Anarchy reenters the wheel of liberation. Anarchy creates from inside our own fountains of rebirth.
All humanity possesses the skills to fabricate freedom and power. Our bodies exist in the realms of suffering and correction, but we can also live in the paradise of liberty and love.
Free the mind first and the rest will follow.


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Volunteer Orientation March 12th
We truly value our volunteers at Paws Humane Society and could not fulfill our mission without their help. Our Volunteer Orientation will equip you with in-depth knowledge about our shelter and provide you with information on how to get started as a volunteer with our organization.
To volunteer at Paws Humane Society, you must be at least 18 years of age, complete an online application and attend a Volunteer Orientation. Paws' volunteers are required to purchase a volunteer t-shirt ($10.80) which must be worn at all times while volunteering.
Thank you for your interest in volunteering with us. We look forward to having you join our volunteer family!
Note: Court-ordered or preemptive community service as recommended by legal counsel will not be accepted at orientation or in the volunteer program. If you would like to perform community service, please call 706-660-5935 or email firstname.lastname@example.com


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Cable ONE is an all-inclusive provider of cable TV, Internet and phone services. The company's mission is to simplify customers' lives. Cable ONE services are available across 19 different states with each branch putting a strong emphasis on being a part of its local community.
"If I could somehow globally thank Language I/O for making this Spanish site launch so seamless and flawless…" We think you just did. Thank you Cable ONE!
Cable ONE realized recently that it was completely missing the opportunity to engage with its local, Spanish speaking communities. It was a huge opportunity given that 80 percent of the population in some communities is primarily Spanish-speaking. Cable ONE had no means of reaching out to this market in a personal and positive way. At least not without spending a lot of money. Lacking the bandwidth within its sales and marketing organization to engage with this audience, and with only a handful of bilingual call center agents, Cable ONE decided that the only affordable route to engage with the Spanish-speaking community was to provide its online, self-help articles in Spanish. Self-help articles would provide substantial support to its Spanish-speaking customer base, as well as allow Cable ONE to reach potential new customers. Unfortunately, after several interactions with traditional translation firms, the translation of this content was looking like a multi-year project.
"Installation of the bolts on the product was flawless, like I didn't even know it happened. I woke up one morning came to work one day, and there was a translate button. It's totally flawless."
With its English support site already deployed through the Oracle Service Cloud platform, Cable ONE wanted to provide that same support site in Spanish to show its customers how much it valued their business. Through a mutual contact, the company was introduced to Language I/O and its solution, Language I/O Help for Oracle Service Cloud. Instead of having to manually export each support article for translation and then import the Spanish version – also manually -- Language I/O Help could completely automate and streamline the translation and export/import process.
After a flawless Language I/O integration, and no translation errors identified to date, Cable ONE implicitly trusts Language I/O. The Language I/O tool translates and publishes the Spanish articles for Cable ONE, freeing up time on Cable ONE's side and ensuring that its Spanish-speaking customers receive up-to-date information as quickly as possible. When new English support content is published, Language I/O automatically pushes that same content in Spanish to their Spanish-speaking audience in a matter of days.


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On this date six years ago, a biology professor that was hiding from his students during office hours on opening day of the baseball season, started a blog. That Professor had little idea what he was doing as is clearly evident in his first-ever post, a post that included a Jonny Gomes home run.
But he started to find his stride later that day when he wrote about a journalist that predicted the Devil Rays would win the World Series…in 2006! That post got a lot of play on the interwebs, and there was no looking back.
So, Happy Birthday to us!


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For those of us who use Linux on the Desktop, it's probably fair to say that we live in interesting times. Having sat on the fence that is Gnome 2, whilst looking on as the relative merits of Gnome Shell, Unity, KDE and XFCE are hotly debated, I was recently given a fresh perspective on this particular debate by the lovely Debbie.
What follows is the story of how Deb converted to Linux, told (for reasons which will become apparent) through the medium of fairytale. Continue reading


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Summary and Context
Today, I will spend time rereading particular pages in the story, Odd Velvet, by Mary E. Witcomb. The reason I am rereading certain pages is to look closer at the craft and structure of the text. The author plays with how the words are written. Now that the students have gotten a good understanding of the key ideas and details in the text, I want students to notice elements of the author's craft. I want them to answer why would the author choose to write the words and sentences in this way. I want them to know that authors are very intentional about the way they organize their stories and that the way authors organize their stories, help us to get to see, feel, and think about places, people, and events in a certain way. Today, the text dependent questions that I developed take my students deeper. They still need to refer back to the text to answer the questions. My questions will be about particular sentences and their structure. To help them with this task, I have created a powerpoint. As I ask them questions about the text, I will call on students to come up to white board and identify the sentences on that page that answer the question by either circling them or underlining the sentences. In this way, I am making the lesson interactive/engaging.
I make sure in this lesson to set the purpose of this rereading. I let my students know that rereading helps our comprehension to grow and deepen. Rereading helps students to notice details that they did not notice the first time. Also, in slowing down the reading, we are able to look at closely at what the author is trying to tell us. The practice of a close reading helps students engage with a major shift with the Common Core State Standards towards focusing on the text and text evidence as a basis for deep analysis.
Before we proceed to the rereading of certain pages, I will take a moment to have students pair share what they remembered from the story. Also, I am having them do a five minute quick write to help them remember key details from the story. *The reason I am asking them to do this is because I was absent yesterday and I want to check in with them, and make sure the lesson I provided yesterday was carried out so that I can proceed with the lesson for today, or if I need to modify today's lesson.
After we are done discussing the word choices of the author, the students will get some time to reflect and write about how certain words stand out and how those words help us to see Velvet in a certain way.
Lesson Opening:
I introduce the objective. Also, I ask the students to pair share about what they remember about the story. I have a few share with the whole group. Then, students go to their tables and write for five minutes about the key details in the story.
Students will do a quick write about the key details in the story of Odd Velvet. As they write, I walk around and read their entries and gage whether they are ready to proceed with today's lesson. This is one way to check in and determine, based on what they write, how well students understood the key ideas and details in the story from yesterday's lesson.
I lend different types of support to students. Some students need me to help them think out loud with them so that they feel confident about proceeding. Others will need help with spelling and others with starting.
Here is an example entry: GoodDetailsToRemember.
I bring the students to the rug for a quick pair share. My students need much practice with academic language and the more opportunities they get to share orally, the better for them. After they share with each other, a few share out to the whole group. In addition to the opportunity to develop their oral language skills, this also gives everyone the opportunity to hear what their peers are remembering and further solidify their understanding of the text's key ideas and details.
I have selected certain pages from the story and compiled them in a power point presentation to have a discussion of why the text is written differently in some sentences.
On the page selected, I spend time analyzing this question with the students: "Why would the author choose to write the sentence in a particular way?"
This is very important. My students will glaze over text that is written differently if not brought to their attention. Thus, with this lesson, I help them notice long and short sentences. I help them to notice words in sentences that are bold and bigger than the rest of the other words in that sentence. I help them notice sentences written in a spiral and in a curve. These features are used intentionally and I want my students to know that. In writing words in a certain way, the author is influencing our opinion of the characters.
As students analyze the printing of the sentence and their content, I am looking for them to refer back to the text in their answers. This is an interactive process to help my students notice the print that stands out. The discussion is worth having because it makes the craft of the author visible.
I gather the students briefly on the rug to discuss the question: Why did the author choose to write the story in a particular way?
I am doing this because I want my students to continue with the practice expressing and discing ideas during Socratic Seminar. In sharing their ideas/viewpoints I want them to get used to supporting their viewpoints with evidence from the text. I also want them to start questioning each other's ideas, and, for this to happen, they need practice in the procedure of Socratic Seminar.
I start by reviewing the rules and how we Hand-Off to one another when we want to pass on the speaking role to the next person. There are discussion starters listed on a chart to help those who need them to enter the conversation.
I am also attaching a document that goes into depth of how I implement Socratic Seminar in my classroom in case you'd like to read more.
Students will now take the time and respond in their journal. They are answering the question: How do the words that stand out help us to see Velvet in a certain way?
I am looking for them to use evidence from the text to support their responses. When we give students time to write about what they talked about and read about, it gives them the opportunity to learn at a deeper level and create lasting connections.
Here are some of their responses:


text:
Welcome to the Cutty Sark! Nestled in the heart of Virginia Beach's serene North End, the Cutty Sark Motel & Historic Cottages are the perfect destination for your family vacation. Our full efficiencies and spacious apartments will quickly feel like your summer home away from home, leaving you more time to explore the oceanfront and enjoy your Virginia Beach vacation! From your efficiency's private balcony, watch the sun rise over the Atlantic's dolphin playground while enjoying breakfast and coffee made at your own fully equipped kitchenette. Your feet won't have far to travel beyond your front door before they're strolling among the boutiques on Atlantic Avenue or dipping into the warm sand and cool surf.
Virginia Beach festivities, beach volleyball, Beach Street USA musicians and performers, cafés and ice-cream cones are all along the famous boardwalk right across the street. Gorgeous bike trails nearby lead you safely all the way to the Virginia Aquarium and First Landing State Park. Plan your vacation around one of the many spectacular Virginia Beach events held every year such as the Boardwalk Art Show, the NAS Oceana Air Show, North American Sand Soccer Championships, and a local favorite - the incredible Neptune Festival. At the end of the day, gather the family around your cottage's backyard grill, or lounge and splash around in the Cutty Sark's heated swimming pool.
Since 1978, Cdr. And Mrs. Koch have welcomed Virginia Beach guests to the Cutty Sark Motel, many of whom have returned year after year to become considered an extended part of the Koch family. Unmatched hospitality and personal attention to your satisfaction ensures your family's oceanfront holiday will be wonderfully unforgettable. Because of this sterling reputation, Cutty Sark Motel & Historic Cottages is not only a member of the Small Elegant Hotels of the World, but has also been praised in the pages of Virginia Living and Southern Living magazines.
This year, let Cutty Sark's comfortable and affordable accommodations treat you and your family to all Virginia Beach has to offer!
Across The Street From
The Beach, Ocean View
From Private Balcony
40+ Years of
Family Fun!
Cutty Sark Motel Efficiencies and Historic Cottages • 3614 Atlantic Avenue, VA 23451 • 757-428-2116
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